Faster Rendering at Lower Watt with Dedicated Ray-Tracing Unit

Rendering on the RTU (tray-tracing unit), a dedicated hardware for ray tracing, is expected to deliver faster ray tracing at lower power consumption.

Rendering on Caustic Professional's RTU is made possible by plug-ins to popular rendering packages like Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max.

Alex Kelley, director of business development at Caustic Professional, a division of Imagination Technologies, has been waiting patiently to unleash its creation on the hardware market for quite some time. It’s a processor, but neither a CPU nor a GPU. It’s developed specifically for rendering. Kelley and his team call it RTU, or ray-tracing unit.

The story of the RTU began with a San Francisco start up, once called Caustic Graphics. The firm was eventually acquired by Imagination Technologies, an embedded processor developer, for $27 million. The RTU’s evolution was shaped by, among others, Michael Kaplan, who previously worked on NVIDIA’s professional rendering solutions. Kaplan currently oversees the RTU project as director of product management.

Last month, at Autodesk University, Kelley and his colleagues decided it was time for the RTU to make its debut. So they set up a booth and demonstrated the latest generation of their hardware, branded as Caustic Visualizer. The RTU works with the CPU to deliver optimized rendering power.

Kaplan clarified, “We’re not trying to be a high-performance computing (HPC) system that happens to do ray tracing … What [other CPU and GPU makers] are doing is to cram a lot of cores into a unit to do parallel computing. But that’s not optimized for ray tracing.”

It is, in Kaplan’s view, inefficient because ray tracing doesn’t need the volume of CPU-based general-purpose computing power provided by HPC systems. It’s also more efficient than ray tracing on GPU because, Kaplan said, “We’re doing as much ray tracing as multiple graphics cards, but our card takes 55 Watts — It doesn’t need a big power supply.”

Currently, rendering by the RTU is made possible by a beta plug-in developed for Autodesk Maya. The plug-in would officially become available in mid-January 2013, and another plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max is in now in development, targeted for March 2013.

Whereas Autodesk Maya is the standard for entertainment and media content, Autodesk’s professional design and engineering software packages (Autodesk Inventor and AutoCAD, to name but two) are bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max in most Autodesk Suites.

It should be noted that the RTU is designed specifically to address ray tracing, a problem in high-resolution rendering. The RTU won’t provide the same general purpose computing horsepower found in professional GPUs. Therefore, the RTU won’t be suitable for those seeking HPC systems to run simulation and analysis programs.

According to Imagination Technologies’ announcement, “Caustic Visualizer is built entirely on the Imagination PowerVR OpenRL platform. Through OpenRL’s highly optimized CPU implementation, Caustic Visualizer can deliver an interactive photorealistic viewport experience on a CPU-only desktop that was previously only possible in competitive solutions based on expensive quad-GPU hardware configurations … When coupled with OpenRL running on the new PowerVR ray-tracing hardware reference platform, Caustic’s Visualizer software can deliver true full-frame (1,024 x 1,024) resolution imagery up to 15 photorealistic frames per second, without the need to de-res the image or add significant noise during interaction.”

Currently Caustic Professional’s RTUs are sold as separate hardware, which fits into standard workstations and desktop PCs. Kelley envisions that, in the long run, the RTU’s technology will become part of the GPU.

About Kenneth

Kenneth Wong has been a regular contributor to the CAD industry press since 2000, first an an editor, later as a columnist and freelance writer for various publications. During his nine-year tenure, he has closely followed the migration from 2D to 3D, the growth of PLM (product lifecycle management), and the impact of globalization on manufacturing. His writings have appeared in Cadalyst, Computer Graphics World, and Manufacturing Business Technology, among others.

2 comments

This sounds Terrific, hope you make it soon in a stand alone solution. I use Mac G5 with Nvidia 7800 GTX 512. My inventions are created on VectorWorks and RenderWorks. All are basic, but are the best I can afford. I would of course love to upgrade all and your new product seems like a natural for someone like myself in my design and creation work.

Wayne: Thanks for sharing your thoughts! For clarity, I should specify that DE and this blog are not affiliated with Caustic Professional or Imagination Technologies mentioned in this post.
If your PC is sufficient to run Vectorworks on its own and you just need a ray-tracing power boost, Caustic Professional’s solution is worth investigating. But I don’t know if either Caustic or someone else is developing a rendering plug-in for VectorWorks. The company does offer a SDK for writing rendering plug-ins. More at: https://caustic.com/brazilsdk.php